Masque of the Red Death (7 page)

“Free masks,” I say. “For the children.”

He coughs and chokes. On smoke from his cigarette or on his surprise?

“That is an excellent idea.”

Elliott stubs out his cigarette and then lights a match. In the moment of illumination I can see that he isn’t wearing a mask. I’m not as shocked as I might have been a few days ago. He holds the match between his fingers and watches it burn.

“There is one problem,” he says. “Very few people know how to make the masks.”

He drops the match to the ground. It sizzles in the mud, and then we sit in silence for what feels like a long time. Suddenly I know why he agreed so easily, what he’s going to ask, that this is why he truly wanted to meet me. This was a game of chess, and he understands strategy.

“Whoever can make the masks can defeat the disease. There is great power in that.” Elliott shifts, and a couple of stones fall from the low wall. “I’ve spoken to the workers at the factory. The filters are manufactured secretly, within the prince’s palace.”

But I know where Father keeps the blueprints.

I think of the young girl putting her baby’s body into the black cart. Her anguish. A mask might have saved her child. Isn’t it worth any price, any risk, to save someone from watching the contagion ravage their family? I wish I could see his face.

I move my foot in a half circle, testing the resistance of the unseen mud.

“I know where the plans are,” I admit quietly.

He doesn’t waste any time.

“I have clever friends. If you can get the blueprints, we can start production in just a matter of weeks. Days. We can distribute them secretly to people without money, for their children. I’d thought of making the masks more readily available, of course. But it would be genius to have you, the scientist’s tragic daughter, distributing them. People would love that.”

Is that who I am? A tragedy? Is that what Will sees when he looks at me?

“I will get the information,” I tell him.

“Be careful. Your father is surrounded by spies.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. “We know that.” We’ve always known.

“I’ll contact you soon. Now that April has disappeared, I need you.” I like that he sounds less self-assured when he says this. It makes me think that maybe we could be friends.

I ask, because I have to know. “Was April lying, or is it true that you write poetry?”

A moment of silence. “It’s true.” His voice is barely audible. “My father nearly despaired of me ever amounting to anything.”

He takes my elbow, guides me back to the ladder. “Descend carefully, Miss Araby Worth.”

CHAPTER

SEVEN

W
INCING AT THE BITTER TASTE
, I
SWALLOW MY
sleeping draft. Father mixes it for me, tired of being kept awake by my screams. Thanks to the medication, I can sleep a dreamless sleep. Most nights.

I try not to think about anything. Not matches lit in dark gardens, or small children who are unprotected from the Weeping Sickness, or April imprisoned. Not rooms upon rooms of soldiers directly below me. I breathe carefully, fighting the panic that threatens to overwhelm me.

After what seems like an entire night’s worth of sleeplessness, I dream of faces obscured by shadows.

I wake with a scream and sit up. My bed is wobbling. I shouldn’t be awake before the sun is up; shouldn’t open my eyes to darkness. I’m groggy, so the medicine is still in my system. Glass breaks, and something crashes to the floor. For a moment the room is bright as day. Then my bed shakes again.

I press my hands against the mattress and pray for the room to stop moving. Am I hallucinating?

I hear Mother and Father’s voices from the next room. They aren’t bothering to whisper.

Another explosion rocks my bedroom.

Bombings have happened before. Once, twice, never two so close together. This is bad.

Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I press my feet against the floor. It doesn’t move, so I dare to stand.

Through my window I see flames against a backdrop of darkness.

I’m going to my parents. My door opens soundlessly, but they must feel a draft flowing in from my room, because they both turn to face me.

A third explosion shakes the penthouse. More glass shatters in the kitchen. Mother whimpers.

I won’t succumb to fear. I clench my teeth. Mother is ridiculous. I won’t be like her.

Smoke billows outside. “Is the entire city burning?” I want to run to the window and look out, as if there is some way that I could see whether Will and the children are safe. Instead I stand, frozen.

“Idiots,” Father mutters. “Burning, looting. They will make their situation worse.”

“The people who are burning the city, what do they want?” I ask. I’m thinking of cloaked men and Elliott’s concern that someone would take over the city before he does.

Father chooses to interpret my question as if I am completely shallow. As ignorant as I was a week ago.

“They want to change their lives. The poverty, their desperation, the state in which they are forced to live. Desperation and apathy are all we have left—” Father is interrupted by a series of staccato explosions. “Sometimes I wish gunpowder had never been invented,” he says.

I stare at him, shocked. This is the man who lives by science. Who exists for discoveries.

I collapse onto the couch between my parents, and we sit in miserable silence until the sun comes up. Mother gasps each time the floor shakes. I keep my feet flat on the ground and my hands flat against the sofa cushions.

“What would our lives have been like if the plague hadn’t happened?” As soon as I say the words, I wish I could take them back.

Mother answers quickly. “You would have gone to school. We would have traveled. Your father had a good job at the university. You and—”

“There is no ‘what if the plague never happened,’” Father interrupts. “It happened. That’s all.”

We sit, silent and afraid.

“Father,” I finally choke out, “can you tell me about the masks? How you made them?”

He gives me a long look. He could be thinking that all I need to know is that the masks can’t be shared, not even between twins. But Father isn’t cruel. If that’s what’s going through his head, he’ll keep it to himself.

“I’m not supposed to speak of it,” he says. “The prince threatened to cut out my tongue....”

Mother whimpers and Father turns away. As if he’s ashamed of upsetting her. Or maybe he’s seen the shock on my face.

I know that my father lives in a precarious place, that he used his popularity with the people to keep us here, away from the prince’s prison, while ignoring the prince’s anger at being outmaneuvered. But I never heard about the prince’s threats. Stealing the plans for Elliott could upset this balance that keeps us free.

At breakfast time, the servants arrive, frightened, smelling of smoke. They risked themselves to come to work. Jobs are difficult to come by. Our courier is later than the others, and his mask is askew. When Father takes him into the lab to fix it, I follow them and listen.

“When did it happen?” Father asks as he examines the mask.

“Men were burning and looting.” The courier’s voice drops, and I have to strain to hear him. “If I contract the disease, please look in on my daughter.” His voice trails away.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Father says kindly, handing back his mask. But he keeps his own firmly in place.

With the sunrise, the flames are no longer visible. From my window I trace the path of the river. We didn’t cross any bridges when we walked home, so Will lives on this side of the river. I scan the lower city for smoke, telling myself that he must be fine.

The city is laid out simply. The upper city is elevated, and the harbor is close. The lower city is bordered by a marshy inlet where the ocean meets a swamp. The river curls around the lowest part of the city, and the remnants of streets frame everything, creating a grid that I can see as I look down, though there are trees and grass growing in places that used to be streets.

Today I don’t recognize the world from up here, and the room I inhabit in this sterile apartment seems completely unfamiliar, too. If April were here, she would laugh and offer me a drink. We would toast to something banal. We wouldn’t talk about what our lives were supposed to be. But we would know.

I turn away from the window, pace back and forth. Without April and her steam carriage, I am trapped.

The hours trickle by. At lunchtime the cook assures me that she sent my packet of food to the address I gave her in the lower city. After lunch Mother plays piano. That’s how she seeks her oblivion.

Instead of working in his laboratory, Father sits on the couch, staring out the window. If he doesn’t leave the apartment, I won’t be able to search his lab.

This conviction that I won’t be able to steal from Father fills me with relief. But relief is quickly followed by guilt at my cowardice.

“Mother gave me money,” I tell him. “I want to buy a child-sized mask.”

Father writes instructions on a slip of paper and then signs it.

Our courier is back at his post in the hallway. Like most people of our social status, we never really have to leave the building. We pay him to brave the germs and the violence. Except that I want to get out. The walls are closing in on me. Without April, I’m only allowed to leave the building with Father. And if I can’t go to the club, I won’t see Will.

I instruct the courier carefully. He is an older man, balding and thin. I remember what Mother told me yesterday, that they sent him to search through the bodies. I shudder, because he was looking for April, and because he had to look, had to touch… I force that thought away.

“Do you have children?” I ask, remembering the half-overheard conversation he had with Father.

“A daughter,” he says.

“Does she own a mask?”

“Not yet. She isn’t old enough for school. We’re saving…”

I scratch out what Father wrote and carefully rewrite the order for two child-sized masks, instead of one.

“Ma’am?” He stares at the note.

“My parents can afford it,” I say.

He folds the paper carefully and puts it in an inner pocket before he walks toward the stairway; couriers aren’t allowed to use the elevator. I consider running after him, going with him to the factory. But as a woman on the street … he doesn’t get paid as much as a guard. It wouldn’t be fair to him. I go back into the apartment.

I nearly collide with Father in the foyer. He pats my arm.

“You’re so grown up. I always meant to have a portrait made. It’s one of my greatest regrets, waiting until it was too late.”

I don’t ask whether it’s too late because I’m too old now, or because what he wanted was a portrait of both of his children.

“I’m going downstairs to inquire about the damage,” he says. His voice is pleasant and vague. Perhaps he thinks Mother is listening.

As soon as he’s gone, I slip into his laboratory. Beakers filled with bright bubbling liquid simmer above a controlled flame that is not so different from the one Will used to cook breakfast for Henry and Elise. The right side of the room is lined with shelves filled with jars of dead insects, mostly crickets.

Father’s notes are scattered everywhere, except for a large wooden desk, which is completely bare. I take one step over the threshold, and then another. Father won’t stay downstairs long. I cross the room, drawn to the desk. The first drawer is empty. No ink, no quill, none of the implements that one would keep in a desk. The next drawer is empty as well.

The third drawer is filled with papers. I grab a folded sheet from the back. It appears to be a schematic for some sort of … airship? At the top Father has written
Impossible
.

Tell the boy this will never fly
.

I hear a noise and jump before I realize it is the cook, padding into the sitting room to ask Mother a question.

In the next drawer I find a stack of carefully labeled papers. Drawings, diagrams, directions. Everything a person might need for making a mask.

“Araby?” Mother calls from the sitting room.

I shut the drawer too hard. Mother must certainly have heard it; I slide the papers up into my sleeve, thankful that I wore this modest dress.

“Araby?” Mother says from the doorway. “What are you doing?” She sounds confused rather than accusatory, and that makes me feel guiltier than ever.

“I was looking for Father.”

“He’s downstairs, talking to the guards. Didn’t you see him leave?” Now she’s suspicious. “Come into the hallway. He won’t want you in here.”

I follow Mother, but before I can smooth the bulge of folded papers in my sleeve, the front door opens and Father steps back into the apartment.

I wait, heart pounding, but Mother doesn’t accuse me of anything.

Father stops and waits, obviously wondering why we are standing there.

“I may work in the laboratory before dinner,” he says finally, eyeing the door that I neglected to close all the way.

“Dinner will be served in an hour,” Mother says. “Cook got some mushrooms—”

She is interrupted by a heavy knock at the door.

I catch my breath. The only person who knocks is April. Everyone else has to go through security at the front desk. A servant opens the door, and we all stare.

A young man is standing on the threshold with a bouquet of very red roses. I almost don’t recognize him because I’ve never seen him in a mask, but he’s wearing one now. The arrogant way he stands and his quizzical eyebrows give him away. They have even more impact, somehow, now that his face is obscured. I like the mask on him.

One of his eyebrows looks darker, slightly singed. I remember him sitting in the darkness, lighting matches. Maybe he burned himself. Or maybe he was out in the city last night.

Either way, I’m thrilled to see him.

Elliott saunters in, shakes Father’s hand, nods to Mother, and hands the flowers to me. I hold them awkwardly; a thorn scrapes my hand, leaving a thin trail of blood.